Enableing Access Gateway (NPIV) on Brocade

Brocade’s flavor of NPIV is called Access Gateway. It’s a way to dumb down the switch and make it more of a pass-through device. When AG is enabled, the switch makes much less routing or switching decisions, and passes all the traffic to an upstream switch. The upstream switch ports switch to F ports, and the “egress” ports on the NPIV switch become N ports.

Trunking doesn’t really work, in AG mode. The switch will load balance between uplinks, and fail traffic to another link in the event of a link failure, but port bandwidth aggregation isn’t done.

You can’t cascade a switch off of a switch that has AG enabled, so it’s only good for edge switches.

I don’t think it works with hard zoning, but I’m not going to test it.

The whole switch becomes part of the AD of the upstream switch port.

The upshot for us is that the switch doesn’t care about fabric changes. It doesn’t recalculate all of the available routes ever time there is a fabric rebuild, which should reduce the interruption to the fabric every time there’s a rebuild. We had problems with errors on ISLs causing a fabric rebuild, and with so many edge switches it was causing issues for the hosts.

To enable AG, first switch to the AD that the upstream port, and this switch, is a member of. In my case it was AD1. And, your upstream port has to have AG enabled (per port on the upstream switch), my 48Ks all came with it enabled on every port.